Shelly Boyd Interview – Salmon

An interview with Shelly Boyd, Arrow Lakes facilitator for Colville Confederated Tribes, where she discusses Salmon and the ceremony at Kettle Falls.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Shelly Boyd – a Sinixt woman with dark hair in two braids, wearing an orange tank-top. She is sitting on a log in front of a river.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:

I descend from knkanawa and he was the – they call him the last Salmon Chief, but I wouldn’t say he was the last Salmon Chief, because we continue to do all of that work and it-it has gone down through the um Louis family.

But um, I would be at the Salmon ceremony at Kettle Falls because that was the main, that was the place you know. [the screen switches to a black and white image of kettle falls – a waterfall on the left side of the photo].

Now they’ll do a lot of different ceremonies, but the main ceremony was always Kettle Falls, because Kettle Falls was  a huge fishery all through the Northwest. [screen switches to a black and white photo of Kettle Falls – people sitting on rocks, and a river on the right side]. It was one of the largest fisheries actually in the world.

The amount of salmon [screen switches to a black and white photo of a man with a large pole that has a salmon on the end] that would come through there would actually feed thousands of people.

[Screen switches back to Shelly Boyd]. With the salmon ceremony we pray for the salmon to come up [gestures with her hands] and I believe in that, I believe in that way.

And yet I would be standing not more than I think 40 miles south of-of teck cominco, knowing that we’re praying for salmon to come up [gestures with her hands] into water that is poisoned. We are like coyote in that way that we think that we know what’s better for everybody else [raises her right hand and gestures] for everything else, for you know, that we are better than.

But the reality is, that if you want to learn how to live, if you want to learn how to appreciate life, you watch a salmon [gestures with her hand to mimic a salmon going through water]. You watch them fight. They fight to go home all the time.

Who are we to decide that they can’t go home, that they can’t make it through there, that they can’t do what they’re intended to do.

And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be responsible, we should completely and totally do everything that we can to stop the pollution that’s happening in the world [gestures with her hands].

We should do what we can as individuals, we should do what we can as communities, but we can’t, we’re not – we’re not above the timxw (all that is wild), we’re not above the animals and they have a wisdom that’s deeper than ours.